Category: business ethics

We start with a post from “Secret Eyes Everywhere” about what you should do if you think Wells Fargo embroiled you in its system of forced enrollment for bank accounts, credit cards, etc. It’s very good advice. Lynn Stout takes on the banking idea of virtue and demolishes it – very nice work. David Yamada in his blog, Minding the Workplace gets reflective on us. “Hello Kitty, Some Blog” has some more on induced earthquakes and we have two good posts from the blog, “The Net Economy.” Last we have a post from “A Philosopher’s Blog,” a site I talked about at length about a week ago.

Best Wishes!!

Please Share, Subscribe and Like — Not just me, but these people are my colleagues and in my mind I see them as soldiers in the good fight and we need as many good hearted souls as we can get in these difficult times. Show some support!

According to The Los Angeles Times, the bank has 90 days to provide federal regulators with a plan to compensate all its customers. Go into a branch or call the customer service line and get a full list of all your accounts in your name. Should you close any or all accounts, be sure to get a receipt showing the account was closed. If there is something on them you don’t understand, be sure to raise hell about it to get it resolved. If a refund of fees is not given, do the next step.

Seek legal assistance (please go to the web site and read the rest! If I include all the good parts I’ll be posting the whole thing instead of an excerpt. jp)

In the wake of the 2008 crisis, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein famously told a reporter that bankers are “doing God’s work.”

This is, of course, an important part of the Wall Street mantra: it’s standard operating procedure for bank executives to frequently and loudly proclaim that Wall Street is vital to the nation’s economy and performs socially valuable services by raising capital, providing liquidity to investors, and ensuring that securities are priced accurately so that money flows to where it will be most productive.

On this Saturday morning, I’m enjoying some reflective moments that midlife sometimes invites — or requires. And although I don’t have the means to do a demographic survey of this blog’s readership, my best intelligent guess is that a good chunk of you have crossed the 40 year mark. I thought I’d collect a group of previous posts that enable some of that healthy reflection, especially for those who identify as being in midlife, but also hopefully useful to anyone who wants to live meaningfully. In these posts you’ll find some of my own commentary, as well as recommendations of books and articles for further inquiry. (He has a wonderful list – please follow the link to see. jp)

Mounted Lakota warriors, their horses resplendent in traditional regalia, charge a line of law enforcement. They gallop headlong, push back the police, pull up only at the last moment, and then circle back for more.

The scene could be the Battle of the Little Bighorn, circa 1876. But it’s not. Here, along the banks of the Missouri River, just beyond the boundary of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota, indigenous land and water defenders are standing together to block the Dakota Access Pipeline, which threatens their land, water, ancestral burial grounds, and future generations. They are part of a decades-long struggle to assert and reclaim indigenous lands, jurisdictions, and sovereignties. And they are doing so on ground that has given rise to indigenous resistance for centuries.

For the average American, it’s easy to mistake the resistance at Standing Rock for a one-time re-run: indigenous warriors emerge from the wild, put up a brief, fierce, but ultimately tragic fight before succumbing to progress and providence. Cowboys and Indians II: Pipeline edition.

In a post-scarcity society, everyone would be guaranteed an income that yielded a standard of living significantly better than poverty, and this guarantee would be unconditional. The move from a near-poverty benefit subject to eligibility conditions to a livable, guaranteed minimum income would require both an increase in productivity, such that a smaller number of workers could produce an adequate income for all, and some fairly radical changes in social attitudes.

It seems clear enough that technological progress can generate the necessary productivity gains, so what is needed most is a change in attitudes to work that would make a guaranteed minimum income socially sustainable.

Yet, ordinary people have not accepted this self-evident, ‘common sense’ knowledge shared by trade experts. They have not only challenged trade expertise by mobilizing counter-expertise (for instance, economic analyses that refute the Commission’s numbers), but they have also mobilized many people in order to make their epistemic claim more vociferously: what the trade experts hold true is wrong, false knowledge. The quarter of a million protesting in Berlin had posited: No, we do not believe that the world is going to be better off due to the TTIP; each and every family will not be540 euros per year richer; and, no, we do not think that the regulations coming out of the TTIP bodies are going to respect the environment.

Trade experts are not seen here as neutral arbitrators of public policy but rather as representing a particular stance as to public policy or public interest.

My adopted state of Florida was just hit by a category one hurricane; my adopted city of Tallahassee sustained considerable damage. A week after the storm hit, there are still people in the city without power. There are also people who suffered considerable property damage. Fortunately, there seems to be only one death attributed to the storm here.

I was rather lucky; though my power was out from Friday to Monday, my house sustained no damage and I was well-prepared. I also had the good fortune of leaving the city on Sunday morning on an already scheduled program review at St. Francis University. While I normally dislike airports, it was great having access to AC and electricity again. While I waited for my first flight out, I enjoyed the cool air and recharged my laptop.

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The first post-Democratic convention polls are coming out, and it looks like Hillary Clinton is regaining the advantage over Donald Trump. Trump came up in the polls last week after the Republican convention, but since the focus was on the Democrats all of last week, this week’s new polls will likely reverse that trend.

With the divisiveness plaguing the upcoming presidential election,“Game of Thrones” fans have been quick to point out the remarkable similarities between the fictional show and the race for one of the most important positions in the world. According to Tumblr, the presidential candidates could easily be stand-ins for “GoT” characters, and vice versa.

As 400 wealthy conservative donors in the Charles and David Koch network gathered at a luxury resort at the base of the Rocky Mountains here, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump took to his normal form of communication, Twitter, to blast the activist brothers, saying he “turned down” a meeting request with them.

The most powerful force in American politics today is anti-establishment fury at a system rigged by big corporations, Wall Street, and the super-wealthy.

This is a big reason why Donald Trump won the Republican nomination. It’s also why Bernie Sanders took 22 states in the Democratic primaries, including a majority of Democratic primary voters under age 45.

The Milton Friedman economic fantasy of unfettered markets rewarding talent and effort with success and upward mobility has been laid to waste by the current state of economic inequality and social stagnation.

But above all, authorities pointed to the stacks of penny dreadfuls found in the boys’ room. These cheap, sensational tales of adventure and (sometimes) violence, often set in the criminal underworld or in exotic locales, were the scandalous comic books and video games of their time, sold to the tune of a million copies per week to working-class boys made newly literate by the educational reform movement of the previous two decades. The yarns published in these pamphlets, often with an intrepid boy as the hero and a fabulous treasure as his reward, would remind modern readers of the adventures of Indiana Jones or Tintin. Nattie told theEast London Advertiser that Robert read these stories passionately and had promised his younger brother that once they were free of their mother, the two of them would head off to India with Fox as their sidekick, in search of “romance and riches.”

This fabricated and fear-driven narrative is nothing new; politics in the United States has often fed into national trends of antipathy toward immigration and non-traditional religious practices. American history is fraught with examples of non-white, non-Christian groups being conspicuously excluded from the American promise – simply because enough Americans acquiesced to the politics of fear. Idealists may point out that the social proclivities of the United States have evolved to be more tolerant, compassionate and emotionally intelligent, but the reality is that the nation is bearing witness to a resurgence of these lower-brained mentalities in the 2016 presidential campaign; where an “us vs. them’” binary, oversimplified worldviews and a tendency to negatively stereotype entire religions, nationalities and cultures has proven to be a successful formula for elevating a boorish reality TV star to fully legitimate presidential candidate.

Conservative-authoritarians possess very strong death anxieties. “Terror management theory” explains how they manifest these existential fears through militant nationalism and an obsession with “guns, god, and the flag.” The Republican Party has relied on ginning up white racial resentment and overt racism as its primary way of winning elections. White “Christian” America feels besieged by demographic change. Social scientists have documented an increase in death rates among poor and working-class lower-educated white Americans from drug and alcohol abuse as well as chronic illnesses. “The silent majority” who live in rust-belt America and dying red-state suburbia feel increasingly obsolete because of globalization and cosmopolitanism. Both the right-wing media and the Republican Party profit (economically and politically) from stoking the fears and worries of White America.

The second (and most powerful) reason that I believe this rebellion will persevere is that it’s organic. Not an artificial marketing creation sprouted in some D.C. hothouse by national groups and moneyed interests, this is a wildflower movement that sprang up spontaneously, took root, and seeded thousands of zip codes.Despite supporters’ natural disappointment that their efforts ended short of the Oval Office, the majority are not petulantly giving up on politics, as most pundits predicted. Why would they? After all, this corps of pro-democracy activists seemingly came from nowhere, won 22 states, virtually tied in five others, and revolutionized the Democrats’ message, policy agenda, and method of campaigning. Having proven their mettle as a talented and inventive grassroots network, they’re eager to push forward. I’ve been out there among them for months — from Great Falls to Cedar Falls, Albany to Albuquerque, Carson City to New York City, and more — and I’ve witnessed their creativity and grit. No way they’ll “Bern out” and fold, for they have audacious, long — term ambitions.

Besides, the gross inequality and corporate rapaciousness they’re fighting will not just go away — and are likely to deepen and spread. Unlike the political and media establishment, which treats elections as periodic games to be “won” with pollsters, funders, and tricksters, this populist team is engaged in REAL politics: the ongoing struggle by everyday people to democratize America’s wealth and power to benefit all and serve the common good.

What if millions of American workers were being denied health insurance, job security and the most basic legal protections, from overtime pay to workers compensation to the right to join a union? What if tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer revenues — money desperately needed to address everything from crumbling roads to education to health care — were never making it to local, state and federal treasuries? What if thousands of companies were violating the law with impunity?

That is exactly what is happening in the United States today, thanks to a rampant practice known as worker misclassification — illegally labeling workers as independent contractors when in fact they are employees under the law. In some cases it’s occurring in plain sight, in others it’s more hidden — but regardless of the circumstances, it is taking an enormous toll on the country.

That war continues to rage, but without the contributions of pioneers like Margaret Sanger, we’d still be stuck in the trenches. Born in 1879 to Irish parents, she was a complicated woman, one who’s best remembered as the tireless birth control advocate who scandalized the country, energized a generation of women and founded the nation’s first birth control clinic, planting the seed for the organization that would eventually become Planned Parenthood. She was also a radical activist, a mother, a wife, a nurse and an extremely savvy media wrangler who excelled at stirring up publicity for her cause (and landed herself in jail a few times as a result). Sanger’s refusal to back down or be silenced is echoed in the steadfast approach of Planned Parenthood itself, even as the problem she labored to correct — American women’s government-sanctioned lack of bodily autonomy — remains ingrained in our supposedly modern society.

I was deeply troubled by the discordant tone of the Philly spectacle, by the haphazard leaps it made from a Bernie Sanders-lite progressive social vision to war fever to a Katy Perry concert. I feel absolutely no doubt that the same insanity virus that destroyed the Republican Party from within has infected the Democrats, and the normals are completely unaware of it. (Case in point: the paranoid desire to believe that Trump is in league with Vladimir Putin to destroy America, rather than just an idiotic, blustering troll.) I’m tempted to issue a heartfelt plea about how we can’t afford the usual left-liberal thing of saying, “Whew, we didn’t elect a monster” and then retreating into our info-consumer bubbles for four years. But who would I be kidding? That’s exactly what will happen. That’s the normal person’s way.

John Little, who examined Lee’s papers after the actor’s death, says he was stunned when he first entered Lee’s library. He had at least 1,700 heavily annotated books. That’s when he realized that Lee sharpened his mind as much as his body.

“The philosophy of Lee is more powerful than the martial arts of Lee,” says Little, author of “The Warrior Within: The Philosophies of Bruce Lee.” “Everything that Bruce Lee did flowed from his mind and his thinking.”

Indeed, many believe Ailes’ derogatory language played a role in his departure from NBCUniversal in 1996. Officially, Ailes — then president and CEO of the CNBC and America’s Talking channels — resigned from the network because he was “uncomfortable” with recent restructuring. But a year earlier, according to biographer Gabriel Sherman, Ailes had called NBC executive David Zaslav “a little f—–g Jew prick,” prompting NBC to launch an investigation.

Bena argues that the giant homes – often referred to as McMansions – are not only out of proportion with their environment but are wasteful symbols of the over-reaching vanity of their absentee owners. Over the past 20 years, what started as an aberration is now a trend – Mansionisation, or the practice of building the largest possible house on a plot of land.

“For me, this is more gross than mere conspicuous consumption,” says Bena. “It’s another type of gentrification. We need to start taking care of our communities and be more careful with land use and zoning.”

A key question in any criminal investigation is: who benefits? Looking at the above chronology, the answer is clear: Donald Trump. Which then leads to a second question: why would agencies of the Russian government wish to undermine Clinton and benefit her opponent? Here the conspiracy theories move up a gear. Trump has boasted of his admiration for Putin as a “strong” leader with whom he can do business. His admiration has been reciprocated by Putin. Trump has also made clear his disdain for Nato as an organisation that enables European nations to have security without paying their fair share of its costs. So if he were president and Putin made aggressive moves against the Baltic states, would he support a strong Nato response? Who knows? But if you were in Putin’s shoes, you’d regard Trump as clearly preferable to Clinton, who is an old-style American hawk.

I don’t throw the word “fascism” around, but can we at least accept that Trump follows the Führerprinzip? He has no colleagues, only followers. He is a racist. Not a closet racist, or a dog-whistle racist, but a racist so unabashed that the Klan endorses him. Above all, he has the swaggering dictator’s determination to bawl opponents into silence with screams of “loser”, “dummy”, “fraud”, “puppet,” “biased”, “disgusting”, “liar” and “kook”. As with the web trolls Trump so resembles, it is never the point and always the person. Female news presenters have to explain that they are not asking him difficult questions because they have“blood coming out of whatever” or surrender to him, as Megan Kelly of Fox Newsdid to her shame. Latinos have to explain why they are not rapists and murderers or shut up and give up. Muslims have to explain that they are not terrorists or they lose the right to a hearing. At every stage, the argument is shifted on to the troll’s terrain of ethnic and religious loyalty tests. Except here the troll could become the world’s most powerful man.

Shipley’s training records show two of his fellow officers had serious concerns that he was too quick to go for his service weapon, that he ignored directives from superiors, and that he was liable to falsify reports and not control his emotions.

A day before Shipley’s training ended, nearly three years ago, a police corporal recommended that the Winslow police department not retain him.

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She’s certainly the best possible next president, as everyone from Obama to Michael Bloomberg has been lining up to say at the DNC all week. But she’s also certainly a representative of the global capitalist status quo; she is campaigning for a pro-business, pro-markets, essentially anti-working-class system. She won’t talk about this, just as aw-shucks Biden and neither of the glorious Obamas would talk about it; like them, she’ll talk about “America”. Which, for a minority of us, is a pretty privileged place.

But where are her new ideas for making life better for people who feel exploited? What is she saying about taking back this country, not from the immigrants (a ridiculous notion in a country almost entirely composed of immigrants and their descendants) but from an economy of theft and extraction and transfer from the poor to the rich?

What if I’m afraid, not of a terrorist attack – only marginally more likely than a personal lightning strike – but of an impoverished old age or a house foreclosure, or simply of my car breaking down and not having enough money to fix it? For too many Americans, these are real fears, and Hillary represents the class responsible for causing them.

Hilary is the establishment candidate and our establishment is rotten, corrupt and incompetent and people are getting fed up. jp

But most of the social mayhem now rising around us is driven by the seductions and stresses of public decay under a capitalism that’s no longer tempered by Adam Smith’s moral sentiments but that is occasionally still challenged by “liberal education,” which conservatives assail whenever it suggests that “economic violence” does exist and disrupts the village that raises the child.

Totalitarian anti-capitalism was so brutal and duplicitous two generations ago that the “Free World” embraced a taboo against criticizing capitalism at all. But today’s casino-like, predatory, intrusively degrading capitalism has degraded even that taboo by ruining social equality and republican habits of the heart — and doing it mindlessly as much as malevolently.

The antebellum American South was not a “Gone with the Wind” fantasy of “magnolias mint juleps.” It was a military state organized around oppressing and controlling black bodies for the purposes of profit and wealth creation for white people. The slave plantation was a charnel house and place of mass rape, where white men and women could sexually abuse black boys, girls, men, and women at their whim. As historian Edward Baptist explains in his excellent book “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism,” the “plantation” is more accurately described as a slave labor camp.

But Democrats are nervous that even while Trump has failed to build a modern political organization, squandered most the past two months, been accused of racism by his own party, neither aired TV ads nor reserved time for the fall, has praised foreign strongmen including Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin, the race is essentially tied.

Trump has taken the lead in some surveys after the GOP convention, despite the disunity and disorganization on display in Cleveland. He has inflamed controversy almost daily, the latest this week with his public call for Russia to “find the 30,000 emails that are missing” of Clinton’s from her private server, essentially inviting a foreign nation to hack correspondence from her time as as the country’s top diplomat.

“Mr. Trump has repeatedly stated that crime in the United States is rising and that we live in a society that is growing more dangerous,” the letter stated. “A preponderance of evidence at the nationwide level contradicts that claim; but more importantly, Trump then uses such specious reasoning to fuel fear of certain minority groups.

“Second, Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated statements have been used to impugn entire groups of people, including Muslims, Mexicans, women, and disabled people,” the letter continued. “We contend that his divisive language prevents the kind of civil discourse that is the life blood of a democratic society. Mr. Trump’s claim that the majority of immigrants from Mexico are criminals, including murderers and rapists, is contradicted by documented evidence. Similarly, Mr. Trump’s call for the use of torture would contravene the United Nations Convention against Torture.”

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Like her career, Clinton’s neoliberal ideology peaked at a moment when its foundations have all but rotted away. There is no great principle at work here that moves and inspires the crowd. To prevail, today’s very old “New Democrats” must incessantly appeal to the bourgeois pleasure of staving off panic without banishing it completely. To make her case for uniting the scepters of the neoliberal West and the U.S. presidency, Clinton must hit a psychological sweet spot: one part sheer terror at the prospect of a fascistic or socialistic takeover, and one part smug satisfaction at not only being humanity’s only hope, but having earned it.

…

For the Clinton campaign, and the ideology she incarnates, the secret motto is simple: The fix is in, and you will like it. Because it really doesn’t get better, except insofar as Clintonism rules longer. Clinton is the Pollyanna of power politics, for whom there’s nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what’s right with her and her squad. Clinton has twisted her husband’s homey maxim about America’s inner goodness into a tribute to her own — an unseemly funhouse reflection of Trump’s own preposterous claim that “I alone can fix it.”

Utterly lost on the Times is the irony that nuclear power was originally touted as a key part of a future where electricity was “too cheap to meter.” Now it’s just another inflexible but powerful dinosaur industry being crushed in the marketplace by a superior product — kind of like mainframe computers or the horse and buggy or … print newspapers.

I love the ideals of my country. But I hate that we’ve been so denied any real knowledge of the world and don’t have the education to think clearly, so we vote against our economic interest and believe in our most shallow first thoughts of fear and hatred.

African American religious leaders have added their weight to calls for action on climate change, with one of the largest and oldest black churches in the US warning that black people are disproportionally harmed by global warming and fossil fuel pollution.

The African Methodist Episcopal church has passed its first resolution in its 200-year history devoted to climate change, calling for a swift transition to renewable energy.

“We can move away from the dirty fuels that make us sick and shift toward safe, clean energy like wind and solar that help make every breath our neighbors and families take a healthy one,” states the resolution, which also points to research showing that black children are four times as likely as white children to die from asthma.

Beyond the racial resentment, xenophobia and Islamaphobia that is very plainly coursing through the veins of Trump’s candidacy and his supporters’ fervor, this election is also marked by a genuine craving for radical change, new ideas and new leadership — a craving that cuts across partisan divides.

“When he wasn’t aboard his yacht, Farid Bedjaoui held court in the Bulgari Hotel in Milan, a renovated 18th-century palace nestled between the botanical gardens and the La Scala theater. Over five years, Bedjaoui’s hotel tab there exceeded $100,000.

In the plush rooms and the granite-lined lobby, Bedjaoui met with Algerian government officials and executives from Saipem, the Italian energy giant. Their agenda, according to witnesses later interviewed by Italian prosecutors: arranging some $275 million in bribes to help the energy company win more than $10 billion in contracts to build oil and gas pipelines from the North African desert to the shores of the Mediterranean.

To shift the bribe money between countries, Bedjaoui used a cluster of offshore companies that helped him shield the transactions from scrutiny, Italian prosecutors claim. Twelve of the 17 shell companies linked to Bedjaoui were created by Mossack Fonseca, the Panama-based law firm that is at the center of the Panama Papers scandal, a review of the law firm’s internal records by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and other media partners has found.”

Gardner, who raised two children as a single mother, says she felt vaguely positive about Bill Clinton when he was elected in 1992. In 2008, she supported John McCain, and in this election she’s become a passionate Sanders backer. She sees Hillary Clinton as integral to the economic system that has left her struggling. “I’ve been working since I was 12. It seems like when I was working as a kid, my money went further than it does now as an adult, just trying to feed the kids. I could work 40 hours a week and go live in the Y because that’s all you can afford,” she says.

The Clintons, says Gardner, “removed a lot of sanctions against companies and changed a lot of laws so companies could pay their workers less, fight unions, fight health care.” Employment used to come with security and benefits, she says. “That was just common knowledge, all those things you got when you worked your butt off for a company.” Clinton, she believes, had a hand in taking all that away. “Bill and Hillary’s friends were all rich, they were the ones who owned all these companies, why not use your power to let everyone in your circle get as rich as humanly possible?”

According to a new New York Times investigation, the other leaders of Fox News may have been emboldened by Ailes’ alleged sexism. More than 10 women told the Times they’d endured sexual harassment as employees of Fox News or Fox Business Network, and several others said they saw fellow employees become victims of harassment. Just two of these cases involved Ailes; the rest of the acts were perpetrated by other supervisors at the networks. They are uniformly horrifying.

Mr. Trump campaigns by insult and denigration, insinuation and wild accusation: Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; Hillary Clinton may be guilty of murder; Mr. Obama is a traitor who wants Muslims to attack. The Republican Party has moved the lunatic fringe onto center stage, with discourse that renders impossible the kind of substantive debate upon which any civil democracy depends.

The men are accused of making $3m profit by fraudulently trading currencies in advance of a client buying $3.4bn of pounds sterling in 2011, according to the complaint. They are accused of buying sterling in advance of the client’s transaction in a manner “designed to spike the price” to the benefit of HSBC “and at the expense of their client”. They also billed their client for $5m in fees for their work.

The 1MDB affair has stretched from Malaysia to Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Switzerland, the Caribbean, Hong Kong and the US. The suspected fraud occurred in three phases in which money was laundered through bank accounts in Singapore, Switzerland, Luxembourg and the US, the government said in the court filing.

In 2009, after 1MDB was set up to pursue development projects, officials of 1MDB and others, under the pretense of investing in a joint venture between 1MDB and a Saudi oil company, transferred more than $1bn to a Swiss bank account.In 2012, 1MDB officials and others diverted proceeds raised through two separate bond offerings arranged by Goldman Sachs Group Inc, according to the justice department.

More than 40% of the proceeds, or $1.4bn, were transferred to a Swiss bank account belonging to a British Virgin Islands entity. More than $1bn was diverted from another bond offering arranged by Goldman Sachs in 2013.

Isn’t it strange that Goldman Sachs shows up so often in these things? jp

It’s a shame more women don’t run for office, because they truly could improve America. Despite Christie’s accusation that Clinton is a “self-proclaimed champion of women” who helped Boko Haram abduct “hundreds of innocent young girls”, studies show female politicians are good for the world. For example, they tend to focus on providing childcare, healthcare and education, policies that help lift the disproportionate number of low-income women out of poverty. Women are also more collaborative colleagues. Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said they “inject less libido and less testosterone into the equation”, which can often lead to better results. Women in office obtain almost 10% more federal funding than male politicians and introduce about double the number of bills.

White power is so pervasive in the US, even attempts to correct it are ruined. Take the recent push to “ban the box”, in which some local governments have made it so that employers can’t ask upfront if an applicant has been convicted of a crime. The idea was to address how the over incarceration of black people discriminates against us in the job market. But a recent study has found that when the box was banned, “the racial gap in callbacks by employers actually increased”, according to economist Amanda Agan.

Why? As NPR’s Shankar Vendantam explained: “When companies were not allowed to check on the criminal histories of applicants, what they did was they fell back on their stereotypes and said, black men are more likely to be associated with crime. So let me just reject black applicants more often or call back white applicants more often.”

Milo shows no remorse for the avalanche of misconduct he helped direct towards Leslie Jones, who is just the latest victim of the recreational ritual abuse he likes to launch at women and minorities for the fame and fun of it. According to the law of the wild web, the spoils go to those with fewest fucks to give. I have come to believe, in the course of our bizarro unfriendship, that Milo believes in almost nothing concrete—not even in free speech. The same is reportedly true of Trump, of people like Ann Coulter, of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage: They are pure antagonists unencumbered by any conviction apart from their personal entitlement to raw power and stacks of cash.

“There’s so many times when people are screaming and yelling and you just go to them: ‘Hey, buddy, how you doing? My names’s Sergeant Francis, I’m with NYPD, I noticed that you’re really upset, now what’s going on with you, is there any way I can help?’” he said. “What’s the expression on your face, what’s the tone of your voice? A lot of it has to do with keeping yourself calm. We have to have some sort of a professional language to use, and that’s what verbal judo really supplies.”

I do not pity the 68 Russian athletes who put the appeal in. I pity the athletes who were cheated out of the success they deserved, the athletes who lost their moment on the podium as well as the financial rewards, and have suffered from the continual self-doubt that they just weren’t good enough.

Yeah, this is sports where we send our children to build character and with a little luck permanently harm their bodies through injury or in some cases officially sanctioned drugs. I’m still waiting for the evidence of character building I’ve been hearing about for my entire life. (I have no problem with the no money sports where both adults and children compete for the love of simple athletics and the joy of movement.)

Twice in its history the United States has been forced to re-create itself, both times in the face of existential crises. The abolition of slavery was the first such re-creation, born out of the crisis of the civil war. The New Deal was the second, the formation of the modern welfare state in response to the crisis of the Great Depression; had Roosevelt acted any less radically, the profound unrest that in certain places had already flared into outright insurrection – an episode of US history that’s largely forgotten, or ignored – might well have morphed into re-creation by other means. Now we find ourselves in dire need of a third re-creation, a revolution in the psyche as well as the structure of the country that takes account of realities that are already upon us. A broadening beyond the psychic island, the insane castle, the encircling wall of the Wasp that Norman Mailer wrote about nearly a half-century ago. It has to happen; the country’s changing demographics, and the sheer weight of human experience they represent, demand it. The only way it won’t happen is by the outright subversion of democracy, which by definition would constitute a very different sort of re-creation.

Adilson Batista Almeida, the leader of Camorim Quilombo, accuses developers of riding roughshod over the history of slavery in the area by destroying archaeological remains at the site of an old sugar mill, and depriving the community of a public space for cultural activities that celebrate its Afro-Brazilian heritage.

“One Sunday morning a chainsaw came and devastated everything including century-old trees,” Almeida said. “I regard the ground as sacred because it is where my ancestors were buried.”

The media village is a condominium – Grand Club Verdant – that will be sold to private buyers after the Games. The land was acquired in 2013 by the real estate developer Cyrela which felled hundreds of trees, destroyed a community football pitch and demolished the remains of the old slave owner’s house and the slavery-era sugar mill in order to clear the area for construction.

On Thursday, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed legislation banning the “tampon tax” – a tax on menstruation products. The measure was approved by the state senate and assembly earlier this year.

“Women statewide will no longer be burdened by a lingering tax that was levied at a time when women were not part of government and the decision-making process,” said Linda B Rosenthal, the bill’s sponsor in the state assembly.

The legislation will exempt tampons, sanitary napkins and panty liners from state and local taxes. It will go into effect in the next sales tax quarter, reported the Associated Press.

When these kinds of products are designated what they are – necessities, and no longer designated as luxuries, we will have taken a step in recognizing the facts of women’s lives rather than the systematic foolishness of old men. jp

“While we are glad to see Roger Ailes step down from his position at Fox News, sending him off with zero accountability and a big check is a slap in the face to the … women he harassed during his tenure as CEO and does nothing to fundamentally change the culture of Fox News that he created,” Nita Chaudhary, co-founder of UltraViolet, a national women’s advocacy organization, said in a statement.

Evidence of human-made climate change is so conclusive that it’s wrong for journalists to treat its denial like a reasonable point of view. But it is a new low for major media groups to sell their brand to lobbyists and let climate truthers go unchallenged.

And The Atlantic was hardly alone. At the Republican National Convention, the American Petroleum Institute also paid the Washington Post and Politico to host panel conversations where API literature was distributed, API representatives gave opening remarks, and not one speaker was an environmentalist, climate expert, scientists, or Democrat.

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The idea of leaving the plant as is and creating a sarcophagus around the three melted down reactors is extremely problematic. The groundwater issue is just one problem that would be a permanent problem. Even the ice wall if it eventually works as planned can only operate for a few years. Erosion and groundwater flows would create a permanent problem for the ocean and the region around the plant. This would also leave the fuel and crumbling buildings in place. Building failures, radioactive dust and fuel debris would all still be in place. This would need to be managed not just due to aging but further natural disasters such as typhoons and tsunami. Current problems include fuel fragments that have been found in unit 1′s torus room basement water. These have been a concern as groundwater flows through these basements that if improperly managed, more of these fuel fragments could leave the basement into the groundwater.

Former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is calling for donations to the relief fund he founded for U.S. veterans who claim their health problems resulted from radioactive fallout after the 2011 nuclear disaster.

Speaking at a news conference on July 5 alongside another former prime minister, Morihiro Hosokawa, Koizumi said of the U.S. veterans: “They went so far to do their utmost to help Japan. It is not the kind of issue we can dismiss with just sympathy.”

Neoclassical economics has since long given up on the real world and contents itself with proving things about thought up worlds. Empirical evidence only plays a minor role in economic theory, where models largely function as a substitute for empirical evidence. The one-sided, almost religious, insistence on axiomatic-deductivist modeling as the only scientific activity worthy of pursuing in economics, is a scientific cul-de-sac. To have valid evidence is not enough. What economics needs is sound evidence.

Liberals are blamed for almost everything, but we are not responsible for the fiasco at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Cleveland this week. We did not make a secret deal with Donald Trump to destroy everything Republican. We didn’t pay Rudy Giuliani to do an impression of Hitler speaking to a Nazi rally. We didn’t make Melania Trump look like a Stepford wife and upload her with a speech that was plagiarized from Michelle Obama’s convention speech from eight years ago.

(This is a particularly good article. You should make a special effort to go to teh original site and read it in full. jp)

First, about 38% of the basic research science is actually funded by taxpayer money—so the public is paying twice: once in taxes and once again for the drugs resulting from the research. This, of course, leaves a significant legitimate area of expenses for companies, but hardly enough to warrant absurdly high prices.

Second, most large drug companies spend almost twice as much on promotion and marketing as they do on R&D. While these are legitimate business expenses, this fact does undercut using R&D expenses to justify excessive drug prices. Obviously, telling the public that pills are pricy because of the cost of marketing pills so people will buy them would not be an effective strategy. There is also the issue of the ethics of advertising drugs, which is another matter entirely.

Third, many “new” drugs are actually slightly tweaked old drugs. Common examples including combining two older drugs to create a “new” drug, changing the delivery method (from an injectable to a pill, for example) or altering the release time. In many cases, the government will grant a new patent for these minor tweaks and this will grant the company up to a 20-year monopoly on the product, preventing competition. This practice, though obviously legal, is certainly sketchy. To use an analogy, imagine a company held the patent on a wheel and an axle. Then, when those patents expired, they patented wheel + axle as a “new” invention. That would obviously be absurd.

Ohio’s Steve Dyer reports in his personal blog that defenders of Ohio’s Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, the notorious ECOT online charter school, have even been lobbying delegates to the Republican National Convention here in Cleveland against Ohio’s crack-down on e-schools which seem to have been collecting millions of dollars every year from the state for phantom students. Dyer writes: “And now, the Ohio Coalition for Quality Education—the state’s ironically named and most egregious defender of poor-performing charter schools… slipped a letter under the doors of delegates to the Republican National Convention….” The letter “blames sneaky Democratic bureaucrats at ODE (Ohio Department of Education) for ECOT’s problems….” In fact, as Dyer explains, passage of a bill modestly to increase regulation of Ohio’s charter sector was passed with bipartisan support. But now, as Ohio’s largest and most profitable charter stands to lose millions of dollars because it has been inflating the per-pupil attendance on which state funding is based, powerful backers are appealing to anyone they can to try to keep their school operating and keep the tax dollars flowing into their profits.

On the morning after British voters chose to leave the European Union, Obama was in California addressing an audience at Stanford University, a school often celebrated these days as the pre-eminent educational institution of Silicon Valley. The occasion of the president’s remarks was the annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit, and the substance of his speech was the purest globaloney, flavored with a whiff of vintage dotcom ebullience. Obama marveled at the smart young creative people who start tech businesses. He deplored bigotry as an impediment that sometimes keeps these smart creative people from succeeding. He demanded that more power be given to the smart young creatives who are transforming the world. Keywords included “innovation”, “interconnection”, and of course “Zuckerberg”, the Facebook CEO, who has appeared with Obama on so many occasions and whose company is often used as shorthand by Democrats to signify everything that is wonderful about our era.

So, I guess we should gird ourselves. If the Republicans lose in November, watch out for some pretty mean-spirited scapegoating directed at the professoriate. For clearly in the eyes of those like Luntz the younger generation has been “lost’ to “socialism” all because of us and that cries out for a “solution.” Never mind, of course, that most academics, even on the left, neither call themselves or actually are socialists of any stripe. Never mind that the number of classes in which openly “socialist” readings predominate is minimal and at many institutions totally non-existent. I challenge anyone to identify a single “socialist” Economics department. Never mind also that the most sacred principles of our profession enjoin us from indoctrination. And, most of all, never mind that a generation brought up during the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression, at a time when income and wealth inequality, not to mention simple abject poverty and homelessness, have grown to hitherto unseen levels might well be likely to question the morality and workability of unrestrained capitalism. Surely instead it’s the professors’ who are to blame for such allegedly extreme views among the youth, not their life experiences.

‘What do the fateful Brexit referendum, the epidemic spread of Nintendo’s ‘Pokémon Go’ game, the escalating death of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and the fivefold growth in tourism since 1980 have in common? The short answer is that they all express symptoms or outcomes of global accelerated change, or ‘overheating’, as I call it in my new book.

Like this:

Polanyi was far more broadly educated than most economists, perhaps an equal to Keynes. He was employed in Vienna in the 1920s as the “senior editor for the premier economic and financial weekly of Central Europe”– the Financial Times of its day and region. On the very first page of the opening chapter of The Great Transformation, Polanyi delivers his judgement on where the logic of mandating free markets as the dominant force in society would lead if not tempered with countervailing power:

Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself, but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way. It was this dilemma which forced the development of the market system into a definite groove and finally disrupted the social organization based upon it.

Almost a century and a half after Léon Walras founded neoclassical general equilibrium theory, economists still have not been able to show that markets move economies to equilibria. What we do know is that — under very restrictive assumptions — unique Pareto-efficient equilibria do exist.

But what good does that do? As long as we cannot show, except under exceedingly unrealistic assumptions, that there are convincing reasons to suppose there are forces which lead economies to equilibria – the value of general equilibrium theory is nil. As long as we cannot really demonstrate that there are forces operating — under reasonable, relevant and at least mildly realistic conditions — at moving markets to equilibria, there cannot really be any sustainable reason for anyone to pay any interest or attention to this theory. A stability that can only be proved by assuming “Santa Claus” conditions is of no avail. Most people do not believe in Santa Claus anymore. And for good reasons. Santa Claus is for kids.

Arnsen’s study documents what many have suspected: the rapid growth of charter schools is itself a factor destabilizing so-called “portfolio school districts” which are conceptualized as school marketplaces managed like a business portfolio in which new schools are opened and so-called “failing” schools are shut down in a constant cycle of churn. Arnsen concludes his interview with Berkshire: “A place like Detroit is just chaotic. It’s the foremost example nationally of the adverse consequences of a poorly regulated education market… Our charter sector in Michigan is unusual nationally in the extent to which the schools are run by for-profit management companies… (W)e have a situation in Michigan where the charter interests are very influential in the state legislature. It makes it much harder in this state to reach consensus not only on coherent choice and finance policies, but also on policy relating to all sorts of education issues….”

In other words, in a state where far-right Dick DeVos and his Great Lakes Education Project along with owners of the for-profit charters are actively buying political influence, it is very difficult to get the legislature to regulate what is an out of control charter school marketplace.

Making a long story short, the federal government enabled banks and private equity companies to monetize the federal student loan program, enabling them to make significant profits from the loans and fees. Because many state governments embraced an ideology of selfishness and opposition to public goods, these governments significant cut their support for state colleges and universities, thus increasing the cost of tuition. At the same time, university administrations were growing both in number of administrators and their salaries, thus increasing costs as well. There was also an increase in infrastructure costs due to new technology as well as a desire to market campuses as having amenities such as rock climbing gyms. The result is $1.3 trillion in debt for 42 million Americans. On the “positive” side, the government makes about 20% on its 2013 loans and the industry is humming along at $140 billion a year.

“Eugenics really took hold in both education reform and reform of social service practices in the state by the 1910s,” says Kate McMahon, a doctoral candidate at Howard University who has been researching Malaga Island, “Those who were poor were also institutionalized and many were forcibly sterilized.” With the growth of this social movement, an increase in sentiment of racism within the state, along with a fear that the black faces of Malaga would interfere with tourist’s vision of the picturesque Maine ideal, it was only a matter of time before the residents of Malaga Island became the center of these social policies and prejudicial fears.

On July 22nd, an engineer is selling, er I mean, discussing, the underground nuclear waste dump…um, I mean, research laboratory. It puts a nice spin on it, when you call it “research”, doesn’t it?? Clearly, this guy is going to market the idea to people–this is not about giving information to the public so that they can decide whether this is a wise decision or not. The way that this project has been shoved through without much public input tells you that it is not what the public wants nor needs.

We have report after report on nuclear waste leaking at other sites: New Mexico and Washington State. Here’s another reporton it.

I don’t care about geology supporting it here in South Dakota. It’s not natural and not supposed to be in the Earth. It will come back to bite us in the arse…we have seen this over and over. The arrogance is astounding.

Kanhaiya Lal desperately cries for help but motorists swerve straight past him. His young son and the splayed bodies of his wife and infant daughter lie next to the mangled motorbike on which they had all been travelling seconds earlier.

The widely broadcast CCTV footage of this scene – showing the suffering of a family of hit-and-run victims in northern India in 2013 and the apparent indifference of passers-by – troubled many Indians.

Some motorcyclists and police eventually came to the family’s aid but it was too late for Lal’s wife and daughter. Their deaths sparked a nationwide debate over the role of bystanders – the media hailed it as a “new low in public apathy” and worse, “the day humanity died”.

Why do people just walk away and do nothing in the face of such suffering? Are citizens of India evil and oblivious to suffering? Certainly not.

Then what’s going on?

In India if you assist a traffic victim the police assume you must be doing it out of guilt and they will likely arrest you and if they don’t you may wind up as a witness in a legal case. And in India, legal cases can drag for many years.

If that isn’t enough In India if you take someone to the hospital they are very likely to try to make you pay for their medical care.

There are efforts underway to change those rules and they are having an effect. India is re-writing its laws.

There are a lot of differences in our system compared to theirs. No one is likely to arrest you for calling an ambulance in an emergency or assume you caused the accident. If you take someone to the hospital they don’t try to bill you if you don’t know that person.

And the results are clear. When you encourage rescue, people get rescued. When you encourage people to not get involved, people die.

Are there examples where Americans are changing systems to encourage a lack of morality?

Absolutely, corporate and governmental decision making is increasingly divorced from any kind of moral code.

The sole concern of business is to make a profit for shareholders. It doesn’t matter whether or not you make a product, accomplish a goal, do good or even stay in compliance with the law. Money is all.

You can read articles where people discuss the idea that the only function of business is to make money. It’s an amazing experience. They hold the idea up of money (and sometimes greed) as the sole goal as if were a philosophical diamond, shining in the light. They talk about it as if they had found truth like King Arthur’s knights searching for the Holy Grail. As if it were obvious to any thinking human being that every other value was subordinate to money or to say it slightly differently, shareholder value.

What do we get when we train people to think only in terms of profit?

What’s happening now is what we get. Corporations that have no loyalty to anything that doesn’t make money. They evade taxes; refuse any responsibility for the communities and nations that have nurtured them. They have become moral free agents or more correctly amoral free agents. Like the superman of Friedrich Nietzsche, they are beyond the rules and expectations of lesser men.

One cause of this situation is found in our relationship with money, since we calmly accept its dominion over ourselves and our societies. The current financial crisis can make us overlook the fact that it originated in a profound human crisis: the denial of the primacy of the human person! We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.

Corporations were created in nations like the United States to allow investors to come together to create great economic projects that could live beyond their creator lifetimes. They were not designed to be our masters or our destroyers.

Each system to encourage right actions and morality has to be based on an ethical system. If India can change its laws to encourage people to save the injured in car accidents, we can change our focus from simple profit to wider moral concerns that include a respect for law and an abiding loyalty to the United States.

Like this:

Classic economics would suggest that raising the minimum wage will kill hiring. I had my basic economics class in 1974 and the book set up a graph showing virtual mathematical certainty that increased wages meant decreased hiring.

Classic economics deals with wages, prices and employment as if they are some kind of “natural forces” like wind and rain. When I was 18 and 19, that kind of thing was persuasive. The young like certainty. And today, many both young and old find the certainty of that kind of free market fundamentalism very attractive. The Utopian vision of the invisible hand dispensing economic justice to the deserving and undeserving is a kind of pre-final judgment. An invisible but very equitable economic deity is the kind of idea that only someone desperate for simple solutions to complex problems can find believable.

There is nothing natural about an economic system. It is made up of fallible human beings. Everything about it is artificial, human created.

Let’s examine the economics in regard to Seattle’s minimum wage increase. This is from Huffpost Business:

Basic economic theory suggests that when you increase the price of something, demand decreases. In minimum wage terms, that would mean when it’s more expensive to hire people, businesses won’t hire as many people. But in practice, the research doesn’t bear that out. Studies show that small minimum wage increases don’t affect employment that much.

Adam Ozimek, an economist at Moody’s Analytics and a frequent economics blogger, wrote Monday about some of the initial results out of Seattle, which started phasing in a $15 minimum wage in 2015. Very early results seemed to indicate that the higher minimum wage, which is only $13 as of Jan. 1, 2016, led to people losing their jobs. But more recent revisions to the local data more or less erase that dip.

This should simply not be possible. Under classic economics, there is no dispute. Higher wages produce job loss and reduced hiring. Yet, here the numbers do not show that.

I want you to remember this very clearly. Classic economics does not in practice seem to work. And we have been using the rules of classic economics for decades. What price have we paid for this “science” and its predictions?

I think the price has been enormous. I believe that millions of Americans are paid less, our economy smaller and financialization adopted as a national policy based on the predictions of classic economics.

It’s time for second look. The data from the Seattle minimum wage demonstrate serious weaknesses in the theories of classical economics.